M. Marcellus to Cicero, written at Mytilene in October — Perseus: Mytilenis m.~Oct.~a.~708 (46). This is the only surviving letter of the cluster in Marcellus’s own voice. The order of letters in Book~4 is not chronological at this point: 4.11 was written in mid-October, after news of the speech Pro Marcello (September) and Caesar’s grant of the recall had reached Mytilene, and so chronologically precedes 4.10. The reader of the cluster should hear Marcellus’s voice once: this is the place.

The voice is markedly not Cicero’s. Marcellus’s sentences are shorter and drier; the rhetorical figures Cicero builds with are absent. He is grateful, plainly, but the gratitude is expressed in the Stoic register that has characterised his exile: he says that he could do without the other things easily and without complaint — facile et aequo animo carebam — and reserves his real warmth for the discovery that one of the very few who truly favoured his restoration was Cicero himself. The closing promise — re tibi praestabo, I will prove it to you in the fact — is courteous and brief. He has been moved against his own preference, and he says so without surrendering the philosophical ground on which his withdrawal stood.